Altaro Office 365 Backup enables customers to back up and restore all their company’s Office 365 mailboxes on an annual subscription. It automatically backs up Office 365 mailboxes to a secure cloud backup location on Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure and enables users to centrally manage and monitor their backups through a cloud-based management console.

Altaro successfully entered the Office 365 backup market a few months ago with its solution that enables managed service providers (MSPs) to provide their customers with Office 365 backup, recovery and mailbox backup storage services. The channel-focused company is now also extending this offering for use by businesses and organizations who do not wish to subscribe to an MSP model, and to the IT consultants and resellers that service them.

A central component of data protection strategies

As part of their data protection strategy, it is crucial that businesses back up their Office 365 mailboxes: Microsoft does not back up Office 365 subscriber data, so companies risk losing critical data due to malicious or accidental incidents, such as mailbox deletion and malware attacks.

For one all-inclusive annual or multi-year fee, Altaro Office 365 Backup customers receive backup and recovery services, backup storage services, access to the cloud console for centralized backups management, and outstanding 24/7 support from a team of experts.

This means customers can avoid the headache and expense of setting up local storage infrastructure or software to save backups to. Additionally, thanks to the product automatically backing up the mailboxes several times per day, customers can literally set it and forget it.

Combatting Office 365 data loss risks

“Many Office 365 subscribers wrongly assume that their data is backed up as part of the Microsoft package – but this is not the case, as Office 365 was not intended to be a data protection tool. This means several organizations out there are currently vulnerable to data loss risks,” said David Vella, Altaro CEO.

“This is where Altaro Office 365 Backup comes in, providing robust backup, recovery, and backup storage and management services that customers can rely on,” he explained. “We’ve built on our backup expertise and proven track record in the industry to help set Office 365 subscribers’ minds at rest.”

Free trial

Resellers, consultants and organizations wishing to try the solution can do so for free and with no commitment for 30 days, by registering here.

Windows Admin Center is a browser-based app that is designed to help users easily manage servers and Windows 10 PCs. It can be used to manage clusters or even single severs which means it’s something admins of all levels should be keen to ensure they are following best practices. Although the tool is accessible, it’s importance means you won’t want to leave any stone unturned and this comprehensive guide accomplishes that.

Microsoft announced today the public preview of the Entitlement Management, which is part of the Azure AD Identity Governance.

I have been working with it since Private Preview, having deployed it ona Proof of Concept for a customer in Australia, for a scenario where user onboarding with workflow approval to access applications is a critical requirement.

Azure AD entitlement management works with Azure AD B2B to enable collaboration across business partners. Employees from a business partner can request access to resources using the same access packages and our policy engine, including provisioning their accounts upon approval by a business sponsor. This makes it simple to grant access to a specified set of resources for your business partners while knowing your processes are compliant and secure.

Here are some of capabilities of entitlement management:

Create packages of related resources that users can request

Define rules for how to request resources and when access expires

Govern the lifecycle of access for both internal and external users

Delegate management of resources

Designate approvers to approve requests

Create reports to track history

To try these features in your own directory, sign in to the Azure portal as an administrator, and go to the Azure Active Directory > Identity governance section.

In summary, with the ELM preview, Azure AD now provide:

Access request workflows, where you can configure different approval workflows for different groups of employees or guests who might request access.

Time-limited access for groups, apps, and sites, so users who are approved don’t retain access indefinitely—their access can be set to automatically expire.